End of Year 2003-2004

Goal 1 - A "Caring Community"

This goal was unanimously re-adopted at our Summer 2003 departmental retreat. We are committed to the enhancement and on-going development of our caring community - this includes our caring for each other, our students, and others who are outside of the department. The faculty agreed that we ought to continue our caring goal and incorporate the concept of caring as compromise. We also agreed that when there is “tension” that we would stay with the tension and work through difficulties in the moment and not simply rush to agenda items or ignore the issues. Relatedly, we agreed departmentally to care for each other in the following ways: 1.) Cut off tangential discussions that occur at faculty meetings; 2) Be aware of the group process and call attention to it as needed; 3) Insure that All meeting agenda items MUST be in on Tuesday to get on the following Wednesday’s agenda.; 4) Celebrate Birthdays and honor each other on our special days! Our outside the department caring objectives are to welcome the new president with a letter and a “gathering” and to reaching out to our site supervisors in a caring way – with a special workshop.

Status: We have worked on maintaining our caring community. We have been somewhat successful in keeping tangential discussion to a minimum. We have been attentive to group process and have endeavored to stay with process issues as they have arisen. While we are able to do this for a meeting, it still remains difficult to come to closure and move on the following week. So, we have been better at getting issues out and not ignoring them, but we still need to work on how to actually come to a resolution(s).

Goal 2 - Student Review

The main goal is to be timelier in our processing of student reviews – the formal in December for all but Monroeville 5th cohort students and in April for students who are of concern and the 5th Monroeville cohort. The faculty also agreed that we needed to revisit the terms used in the letters to students and perhaps develop a rubric that would aid consistency and that could be sent in conjunction with the students’ letters.

Status: We did develop a assessment rubric. Formal student reviews were concluded in December no reviews were conducted in April. We will discuss students of concern at the July retreat. While the review was conducted the formal letters were not sent our to mid-may. There clearly remains an issue with getting the student letters out to them. Since this is the responsibility of the chairperson, the process will need to be re-evaluated. Perhaps a committee could be assigned to insure that letters were issued in a more timely manner.